We had a bit of a scare last night. Russia (who is a Siberian husky, we have 2 Sibes and one Shiba) ate something at the park and started behaving weirdly around 8pm. She was uncoordinated and spaced out, had body twitches and her head was wobbly. So we went to the emergency vet and his diagnosis was that she probably ate... marijuana!!!! He thinks she was high!!! Apparently dogs tend to eat it if they find some. Her very slow heart rate supported his theory. They kept her overnight on an iv drip and say she seems better now and her blood looked fine. We can pick her up at 5pm. We're just hoping this was it and nothing more serious which could leave permanent damage, but it's kind of messed up. What a scare! According to a vet tech I talked to it happens more often than you would think and dogs can get really sick (she has seen a Jack Russel convulsing who had to have an iv for 4 days before he got better). Anyone has had anything like this? It's still hard to believe we had a stoned husky :S I guess the lesson we learned the hard way is to pay close attention to what your dog may be eating at the park!

She's back home and back to normal!Thanks for the articles Snf, interesting to read! Oh and she knows the "drop it" command, I was just not paying attention until it was too late :( Actually, I thought it was poo she ate (they like cat poo), and there are raccoons there too sometimes, so I was 'convinced' she ate that. Quite a surprise when the vet suggested cannabis! There are kids smoking up around there sometimes, so perhaps they threw butts in the park. We did have a good 15 cm of snow yesterday though (we're in Montreal, Canada), so for sure she had to dig for it...

Kerichelle, the vet did take a blood test, and the results were fine. She was back to normal after a few hours and all the symptoms agree with THC intake. Of course we are not 100% sure, but since she's back to normal we're going to go with that diagnosis. If it happens again (and we're sure she hasn't eaten anything at the park), of course we will look for other possibilities. But we're assuming and hoping it was just a bad trip :)

And responding to kerichelle, seizure disorders are nearly impossible to diagnose, so there's not much a vet could do for that. If you see a seizure, and it doesn't seem like the dog has eaten anything, then they say the dog had an unexplained seizure. You can do an MRI at the point for over a thousand dollars if you want to know if there is anything in the brain that would trigger seizures, but most people don't have the resources to do that on the basis of one seizure. So if it were me, I'd go with this diagnosis, too, and if she has another seizure, which I certainly hope she doesn't, then it will be time to reevaluate.

(in the case of my epileptic dog, we decided there was evidence of other seizures in the past, so did start treating for epilepsy--ie. a seizure disorder which we don't know the cause of. However, BOTH my dogs had seizures in the same month, which suggested that they had eaten something. We treat one for her disorder as she has other seizures, but the other dog never had another one. My point with all this is simply that it is really difficult to diagnose seizure disorders and even more difficult to find their cause. And I certainly hope that Marije never needs this information!)

I'm going to bump this post up cause I had an incident with Blitz over the weekend. We were at my family vacation home over the weekend and my cousins had just left a couple days before I got there. I've known them to do drugs and I thought they'd have the common sense to not bring it anywhere near that house since there are small children there all the time. I saw Blitz eat something he had found before I could stop him and maybe an hour later he's doing the Shiba 500 and when he stops he's walking as of he's intoxicated, he couldn't stand and he had no control over his bladder. Since we were kind of in the middle of nowhere my boyfriend and I drove for 2hrs in the middle of the night to find a 24hr vet. The technician during her questioning said she didn't mean to be offensive or to accuse us but asked if he possibly could've been exposed to marijuana. I wanted to have more faith in my cousin but I didn't. They did a urine drip test on Blitz and it came back positive. Needless to say that was probably the scariest night of my life. I was lucky enough that he only had a small amount and that we ended up just needing to observe him until the effects passed. I needed to vent what happened cause I'm still super pissed about the situation.

The vet said it was probably just a few little pieces because his symptoms weren't as bad as they could've been. I'm just glad he didn't find more because it could've been worse. The woman says it is possible for a dog to die from ingesting an insane amount but that would be more alone the lines of a pound of it